Thinking about Sally Ride

[lillibet]

A friend used to tell the story of the time when her son suddenly decided that he wanted to be a girl. He was about six years old and she was open to him being whoever he became, but it seemed an unlikely choice for this particular kid. So she talked to him about it, trying to figure out where this was coming from. Slowly she pieced together that they had recently visited an exhibit about women in science that featured Sally Ride and Christa McAuliffe and that in his alphabet book, R was for "rocket" and showed a girl with her ponytail flying out the porthole of a rocket. He didn't want to be a girl, he wanted to be an astronaut and he didn't know that boys could do that, too.

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